Bryce Zabel

An award-winning screenwriter and journalist, Bryce Zabel is a recognized subject matter expert on the issue of UFO/UAP reality.

This year, The Last Battle—Bryce Zabel’s WWII film based on a true story that became a New York Times bestseller—will shoot in Bratislava with Harald Zwart directing from Bryce’s screenplay.

Bryce co-hosts Need to Know, the popular podcast and video series. To date, the show has charted nearly 12-million aggregate podcast downloads and YouTube views and was winner of the Roswell Film Festival’s “Best Podcast” award.

Bryce has now written an initial order of episodes of Undeniable, a scripted podcast set in a post-disclosure world, to be produced with Jeff Sagansky, the former president of CBS and Sony, in partnership with Lionsgate. 

His two UFO-themed features, Missing Time (the Betty and Barney Hill abduction), and The Crash (Roswell), are both before buyers in the broadcast and streaming marketplace. 

This year Bryce expects to complete writing his next book, Sound, Light & Frequency: Close Encounters of the Hollywood Kind, his extremely personal story about the relationship between show business, government, and the UFO topic.

In the world of UFO and UAP reality, Bryce is known widely for a TV series, a book, a movie, and a whistleblower interview.

• In 2023, the first on-camera interview with whistleblower David Grusch was recorded at Bryce’s home the day before Ross Coulthart’s famous News Nation interview and two months before Grusch testified under oath in front of the U.S. House of Representatives.
• In 2012, he co-authored with Richard Dolan the groundbreaking non-fiction book, A.D. After Disclosure: When the Government Finally Reveals the Truth about Alien Contact, now considered a one-of-a-kind classic in the field.
• In 2000, Bryce was one of the original writers working on the development of the Emmy award-winning Taken limited series with Steven Spielberg.
• In 1996, he co-created Dark Skies, an hour drama for NBC, about the UFO cover-up in the 1960s seen through the eyes of a congressional staffer who unwittingly recruits himself into the Majestic-12 organization. During the production of this landmark alien invasion sci-fi series, he won an Emmy for its Main Titles and was nominated for a Writers Guild Award for his pilot screenplay. During the production, a real Man in Black crashed the series premiere party being held at Bryce’s own home.
• In 1993, he wrote and co-produced Syfy’s first original film, Official Denial, about a UFO crash retrieval, an alien survivor, and the surprise discovery that extraterrestrials were actually humans from our future.

Bryce began his career as an anchor/reporter at local stations in Oregon and Arizona. He moved to Los Angeles as an on-air correspondent at CNN, where he covered everything from space shuttle landings to presidential campaigns. He was also an award-winning investigative reporter at the PBS series Newsbeat, covering the Voyager spacecraft as part of a ‘live’ interview with Carl Sagan.

He was the first writer elected Chairman/CEO of the Television Academy since Rod Serling, the creator of The Twilight Zone. Elected just days before 9/11, Bryce was forced to postpone the Emmy awards twice in 2001, something he describes as a graduate degree in crisis communications.

Bryce is the winner of the prestigious WGA award along with his wife, Jackie, for their prescient Pandemic limited series that predicted Covid before it happened. 

Besides Dark Skies, Bryce has created and produced a total of five primetime television series (i.e. M.A.N.T.I.S., The Crow, Kay O’Brien, E.N.G.), and worked on a dozen TV writing staffs (i.e. Lois & Clark, L.A. Law, Life Goes On). 

He has received feature writing credits on both Atlantis: The Lost Empire and Mortal Kombat: Annihilation. 

His two novels, Once There Was a Way: What if The Beatles Stayed Together? and Surrounded by Enemies: What if Kennedy Survived Dallas?, both won the coveted Sidewise Award for Alternate History.

Bryce has a BA in Broadcast Journalism from the University of Oregon. He has taught graduate level screenwriting at the USC School of Cinematic Arts. His production company, Stellar Productions, has operated out of Los Angeles since 1984.

Needto Know With Coulthart and Zabel

The Need-to-Know podcast deals with the now acknowledged reality of Unidentified Aerial Phenomena or UAP. Its hosts are award-winning broadcasters and investigative journalists Ross Coulthart and Bryce Zabel. Every episode, they look at what’s happened in the UAP/UFO world. Coulthart and Zabel discuss their current investigations, give each other advice, and seek to answer the big questions: who are they and what do they want?